1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to the monitoring of web page transfers between web clients and servers.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the information technology (IT) departments of modem organizations, one of to the biggest challenges is meeting the increasingly demanding service levels required by users. With more and more applications directly accessible to customers via automated interfaces such as the world wide web, “normal” business hours for many enterprises are now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result, the importance of monitoring and maintaining the quality of web applications and web services has increased dramatically.
Web applications and web services may be monitored on both the server side and the client side. Monitoring the server side may comprise monitoring the performance of a single node web server, or monitoring the performance of dozens or hundreds of nodes organized into multiple tiers of web servers, application servers and databases. Monitoring a multi-tier server installation may comprise monitoring communications within a given tier and communications between tiers. The monitored performance of the server side may further be correlated to distinct web page requests, client network addresses, and the historical performance of the server side.
Client side monitoring may comprise monitoring the performance of a web browser in rendering and displaying a web page. However, client side monitoring often occurs independently of server side monitoring, with no correlation between the performance data. Furthermore, even when client side monitoring occurs, only a select subset of clients may be monitored, and only in certain artificial scenarios which may not be indicative of real-world usage. Accordingly, such client side monitoring may be of limited applicability in presenting a complete picture of all transactions between the client and server.